OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Using Time to Break Symmetry: Universal Deterministic Anonymous Rendezvous
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Two anonymous mobile agents navigate synchronously in an anonymous graph and have to meet at a node, using a deterministic algorithm. This is a symmetry breaking task called rendezvous, equivalent to the fundamental task of leader election between the agents. When is this feasible in a completely anonymous environment? It is known that agents can always meet if their initial positions are nonsymmetric, and that if they are symmetric and agents start simultaneously then rendezvous is impossible. What happens for symmetric initial positions with non-simultaneous start? Can symmetry between the agents be broken by the delay between their starting times? In order to answer these questions, we consider {\em space-time initial configurations} (abbreviated by STIC). A STIC is formalized as $[(u,v),δ]$, where $u$ and $v$ are initial nodes of the agents in some graph and $δ$ is a non-negative integer that represents the difference between their starting times. A STIC is {\em feasible} if there exists a deterministic algorithm, even dedicated to this particular STIC, which accomplishes rendezvous for it. Our main result is a characterization of all feasible STICs and the design of a universal deterministic algorithm that accomplishes rendezvous for all of them without {\em any } a priori knowledge of the agents. Thus, as far as feasibility is concerned, we completely solve the problem of symmetry breaking between two anonymous agents in anonymous graphs. Moreover, we show that such a universal algorithm cannot work for all feasible STICs in time polynomial in the initial distance between the agents.
Coronary Artery Centerline Extraction in Cardiac CT Angiography Using a CNN-Based Orientation Classifier
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Coronary artery centerline extraction in cardiac CT angiography (CCTA) images is a prerequisite for evaluation of stenoses and atherosclerotic plaque. We propose an algorithm that extracts coronary artery centerlines in CCTA using a convolutional neural network (CNN). A 3D dilated CNN is trained to predict the most likely direction and radius of an artery at any given point in a CCTA image based on a local image patch. Starting from a single seed point placed manually or automatically anywhere in a coronary artery, a tracker follows the vessel centerline in two directions using the predictions of the CNN. Tracking is terminated when no direction can be identified with high certainty. The CNN was trained using 32 manually annotated centerlines in a training set consisting of 8 CCTA images provided in the MICCAI 2008 Coronary Artery Tracking Challenge (CAT08). Evaluation using 24 test images of the CAT08 challenge showed that extracted centerlines had an average overlap of 93.7% with 96 manually annotated reference centerlines. Extracted centerline points were highly accurate, with an average distance of 0.21 mm to reference centerline points. In a second test set consisting of 50 CCTA scans, 5,448 markers in the coronary arteries were used as seed points to extract single centerlines. This showed strong correspondence between extracted centerlines and manually placed markers. In a third test set containing 36 CCTA scans, fully automatic seeding and centerline extraction led to extraction of on average 92% of clinically relevant coronary artery segments. The proposed method is able to accurately and efficiently determine the direction and radius of coronary arteries. The method can be trained with limited training data, and once trained allows fast automatic or interactive extraction of coronary artery trees from CCTA images.
Competitive Online Virtual Cluster Embedding Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

In the conventional cloud service model, computing resources are allocated for tenants on a pay-per-use basis. However, the performance of applications that communicate inside this network is unpredictable because network resources are not guaranteed. To mitigate this issue, the virtual cluster (VC) model has been developed in which network and compute units are guaranteed. Thereon, many algorithms have been developed that are based on novel extensions of the VC model in order to solve the online virtual cluster embedding problem (VCE) with additional parameters. In the online VCE, the resource footprint is greedily minimized per request which is connected with maximizing the profit for the provider per request. However, this does not imply that a global maximization of the profit over the whole sequence of requests is guaranteed. In fact, these algorithms do not even provide a worst case guarantee on a fraction of the maximum achievable profit of a certain sequence of requests. Thus, these online algorithms do not provide a competitive ratio on the profit. In this thesis, two competitive online VCE algorithms and two heuristic algorithms are presented. The competitive online VCE algorithms have different competitive ratios on the objective function and the capacity constraints whereas the heuristic algorithms do not violate the capacity constraints. The worst case competitive ratios are analyzed. After that, the evaluation shows the advantages and disadvantages of these algorithms in several scenarios with different request patterns and profit metrics on the fat-tree and MDCube datacenter topologies. The results show that for different scenarios, different algorithms have the best performance with respect to certain metrics.
Efficient Crowd Exploration of Large Networks: The Case of Causal Attribution
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

Accurately and efficiently crowdsourcing complex, open-ended tasks can be difficult, as crowd participants tend to favor short, repetitive "microtasks". We study the crowdsourcing of large networks where the crowd provides the network topology via microtasks. Crowds can explore many types of social and information networks, but we focus on the network of causal attributions, an important network that signifies cause-and-effect relationships. We conduct experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) testing how workers propose and validate individual causal relationships and introduce a method for independent crowd workers to explore large networks. The core of the method, Iterative Pathway Refinement, is a theoretically-principled mechanism for efficient exploration via microtasks. We evaluate the method using synthetic networks and apply it on AMT to extract a large-scale causal attribution network, then investigate the structure of this network as well as the activity patterns and efficiency of the workers who constructed this network. Worker interactions reveal important characteristics of causal perception and the network data they generate can improve our understanding of causality and causal inference.
Summary of a Literature Review in Scalability of QoS-aware Service Composition
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

This paper shows that authors have no consistent way to characterize the scalability of their solutions, and so consider only a limited number of scaling characteristics. This review aimed at establishing the evidence that the route for designing and evaluating the scalability of dynamic QoS-aware service composition mechanisms has been lacking systematic guidance, and has been informed by a very limited set of criteria. For such, we analyzed 47 papers, from 2004 to 2018.
A Survey on Periocular Biometrics Research
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Periocular refers to the facial region in the vicinity of the eye, including eyelids, lashes and eyebrows. While face and irises have been extensively studied, the periocular region has emerged as a promising trait for unconstrained biometrics, following demands for increased robustness of face or iris systems. With a surprisingly high discrimination ability, this region can be easily obtained with existing setups for face and iris, and the requirement of user cooperation can be relaxed, thus facilitating the interaction with biometric systems. It is also available over a wide range of distances even when the iris texture cannot be reliably obtained (low resolution) or under partial face occlusion (close distances). Here, we review the state of the art in periocular biometrics research. A number of aspects are described, including: i) existing databases, ii) algorithms for periocular detection and/or segmentation, iii) features employed for recognition, iv) identification of the most discriminative regions of the periocular area, v) comparison with iris and face modalities, vi) soft-biometrics (gender/ethnicity classification), and vii) impact of gender transformation and plastic surgery on the recognition accuracy. This work is expected to provide an insight of the most relevant issues in periocular biometrics, giving a comprehensive coverage of the existing literature and current state of the art.
AutOTranS: an Autonomous Open World Transportation System
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

Tasks in outdoor open world environments are now ripe for automation with mobile manipulators. The dynamic, unstructured and unknown environments associated with such tasks -- a prime example would be collecting roadside trash -- makes them particularly challenging. In this paper we present an approach to solving the problem of picking up, transporting, and dropping off novel objects outdoors. Our solution integrates a navigation system, a grasp detection and planning system, and a custom task planner. We perform experiments that demonstrate that the system can be used to transport a wide class of novel objects (trash bags, general garbage, gardening tools and fruits) in unstructured settings outdoors with a relatively high end-to-end success rate of 85%. See it at work at: https://youtu.be/93nWXhaGEWA
Deep LDA Hashing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The conventional supervised hashing methods based on classification do not entirely meet the requirements of hashing technique, but Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) does. In this paper, we propose to perform a revised LDA objective over deep networks to learn efficient hashing codes in a truly end-to-end fashion. However, the complicated eigenvalue decomposition within each mini-batch in every epoch has to be faced with when simply optimizing the deep network w.r.t. the LDA objective. In this work, the revised LDA objective is transformed into a simple least square problem, which naturally overcomes the intractable problems and can be easily solved by the off-the-shelf optimizer. Such deep extension can also overcome the weakness of LDA Hashing in the limited linear projection and feature learning. Amounts of experiments are conducted on three benchmark datasets. The proposed Deep LDA Hashing shows nearly 70 points improvement over the conventional one on the CIFAR-10 dataset. It also beats several state-of-the-art methods on various metrics.
State of the Art Optical Character Recognition of 19th Century Fraktur Scripts using Open Source Engines
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we evaluate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of 19th century Fraktur scripts without book-specific training using mixed models, i.e. models trained to recognize a variety of fonts and typesets from previously unseen sources. We describe the training process leading to strong mixed OCR models and compare them to freely available models of the popular open source engines OCRopus and Tesseract as well as the commercial state of the art system ABBYY. For evaluation, we use a varied collection of unseen data from books, journals, and a dictionary from the 19th century. The experiments show that training mixed models with real data is superior to training with synthetic data and that the novel OCR engine Calamari outperforms the other engines considerably, on average reducing ABBYYs character error rate (CER) by over 70%, resulting in an average CER below 1%.
Phrase-Based Attentions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Most state-of-the-art neural machine translation systems, despite being different in architectural skeletons (e.g. recurrence, convolutional), share an indispensable feature: the Attention. However, most existing attention methods are token-based and ignore the importance of phrasal alignments, the key ingredient for the success of phrase-based statistical machine translation. In this paper, we propose novel phrase-based attention methods to model n-grams of tokens as attention entities. We incorporate our phrase-based attentions into the recently proposed Transformer network, and demonstrate that our approach yields improvements of 1.3 BLEU for English-to-German and 0.5 BLEU for German-to-English translation tasks on WMT newstest2014 using WMT'16 training data.
Handover between Macrocell and Femtocell for UMTS based Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

The femtocell networks that use home base station and existing xDSL or other cable line as backhaul connectivity can fulfill the upcoming demand of high data rate for wireless communication system as well as can extend the coverage area. Hence the modified handover procedure for existing networks is needed to support the macrocell/femtocell integrated network. Some modifications of existing network and protocol architecture for the integration of femtocell networks with the existing UMTS based macrocell networks are essential. These modifications change the signal flow for handover procedures due to different 2-tier cell (macrocell and femtocell) environment. The measurement of signal-to-interference ratio parameter should be considered for handover between macrocell and femtocell. A frequent and unnecessary handover is another problem for hierarchical network environment that must be optimized to improve the performance of macrocell/femtocell integrated network. In this paper, firstly we propose the concentrator based and without concentrator based femtocell network architecture. Then we present the signal flow with appropriate parameters for the handover between 3GPP UMTS based macrocell and femtocell networks. A scheme for unnecessary handoff minimization is also presented in this paper. We simulate the proposed handover optimization scheme to validate the performance.
CINIC-10 is not ImageNet or CIFAR-10
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In this brief technical report we introduce the CINIC-10 dataset as a plug-in extended alternative for CIFAR-10. It was compiled by combining CIFAR-10 with images selected and downsampled from the ImageNet database. We present the approach to compiling the dataset, illustrate the example images for different classes, give pixel distributions for each part of the repository, and give some standard benchmarks for well known models. Details for download, usage, and compilation can be found in the associated github repository.
A Vertical PRF Architecture for Microblog Search
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

In microblog retrieval, query expansion can be essential to obtain good search results due to the short size of queries and posts. Since information in microblogs is highly dynamic, an up-to-date index coupled with pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) with an external corpus has a higher chance of retrieving more relevant documents and improving ranking. In this paper, we focus on the research question:how can we reduce the query expansion computational cost while maintaining the same retrieval precision as standard PRF? Therefore, we propose to accelerate the query expansion step of pseudo-relevance feedback. The hypothesis is that using an expansion corpus organized into verticals for expanding the query, will lead to a more efficient query expansion process and improved retrieval effectiveness. Thus, the proposed query expansion method uses a distributed search architecture and resource selection algorithms to provide an efficient query expansion process. Experiments on the TREC Microblog datasets show that the proposed approach can match or outperform standard PRF in MAP and NDCG@30, with a computational cost that is three orders of magnitude lower.
The Long Road to Computational Location Privacy: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

The widespread adoption of continuously connected smartphones and tablets developed the usage of mobile applications, among which many use location to provide geolocated services. These services provide new prospects for users: getting directions to work in the morning, leaving a check-in at a restaurant at noon and checking next day's weather in the evening are possible right from any mobile device embedding a GPS chip. In these location-based applications, the user's location is sent to a server, which uses them to provide contextual and personalised answers. However, nothing prevents the latter from gathering, analysing and possibly sharing the collected information, which opens the door to many privacy threats. Indeed, mobility data can reveal sensitive information about users, among which one's home, work place or even religious and political preferences. For this reason, many privacy-preserving mechanisms have been proposed these last years to enhance location privacy while using geolocated services. This article surveys and organises contributions in this area from classical building blocks to the most recent developments of privacy threats and location privacy-preserving mechanisms. We divide the protection mechanisms between online and offline use cases, and organise them into six categories depending on the nature of their algorithm. Moreover, this article surveys the evaluation metrics used to assess protection mechanisms in terms of privacy, utility and performance. Finally, open challenges and new directions to address the problem of computational location privacy are pointed out and discussed.
Towards Robot-Centric Conceptual Knowledge Acquisition
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

Robots require knowledge about objects in order to efficiently perform various household tasks involving objects. The existing knowledge bases for robots acquire symbolic knowledge about objects from manually-coded external common sense knowledge bases such as ConceptNet, Word-Net etc. The problem with such approaches is the discrepancy between human-centric symbolic knowledge and robot-centric object perception due to its limited perception capabilities. Ultimately, significant portion of knowledge in the knowledge base remains ungrounded into robot's perception. To overcome this discrepancy, we propose an approach to enable robots to generate robot-centric symbolic knowledge about objects from their own sensory data, thus, allowing them to assemble their own conceptual understanding of objects. With this goal in mind, the presented paper elaborates on the work-in-progress of the proposed approach followed by the preliminary results.
DepecheMood++: a Bilingual Emotion Lexicon Built Through Simple Yet Powerful Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Several lexica for sentiment analysis have been developed and made available in the NLP community. While most of these come with word polarity annotations (e.g. positive/negative), attempts at building lexica for finer-grained emotion analysis (e.g. happiness, sadness) have recently attracted significant attention. Such lexica are often exploited as a building block in the process of developing learning models for which emotion recognition is needed, and/or used as baselines to which compare the performance of the models. In this work, we contribute two new resources to the community: a) an extension of an existing and widely used emotion lexicon for English; and b) a novel version of the lexicon targeting Italian. Furthermore, we show how simple techniques can be used, both in supervised and unsupervised experimental settings, to boost performances on datasets and tasks of varying degree of domain-specificity.
Novel Single View Constraints for Manhattan 3D Line Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper proposes a novel and exact method to reconstruct line-based 3D structure from a single image using Manhattan world assumption. This problem is a distinctly unsolved problem because there can be multiple 3D reconstructions from a single image. Thus, we are often forced to look for priors like Manhattan world assumption and common scene structures. In addition to the standard orthogonality, perspective projection, and parallelism constraints, we investigate a few novel constraints based on the physical realizability of the 3D scene structure. We treat the line segments in the image to be part of a graph similar to straws and connectors game, where the goal is to back-project the line segments in 3D space and while ensuring that some of these 3D line segments connect with each other (i.e., truly intersect in 3D space) to form the 3D structure. We consider three sets of novel constraints while solving the reconstruction: (1) constraints on a series of Manhattan line intersections that form cycles, but are not all physically realizable, (2) constraints on true and false intersections in the case of nearby lines lying on the same Manhattan plane, and (3) constraints from the intersections on boundary and non-boundary line segments. The reconstruction is achieved using mixed integer linear programming (MILP), and we show compelling results on real images. Along with this paper, we will release a challenging Single View Line Reconstruction dataset with ground truth 3D line models for research purposes.
Efficient Two-Step Adversarial Defense for Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In recent years, deep neural networks have demonstrated outstanding performance in many machine learning tasks. However, researchers have discovered that these state-of-the-art models are vulnerable to adversarial examples: legitimate examples added by small perturbations which are unnoticeable to human eyes. Adversarial training, which augments the training data with adversarial examples during the training process, is a well known defense to improve the robustness of the model against adversarial attacks. However, this robustness is only effective to the same attack method used for adversarial training. Madry et al.(2017) suggest that effectiveness of iterative multi-step adversarial attacks and particularly that projected gradient descent (PGD) may be considered the universal first order adversary and applying the adversarial training with PGD implies resistance against many other first order attacks. However, the computational cost of the adversarial training with PGD and other multi-step adversarial examples is much higher than that of the adversarial training with other simpler attack techniques. In this paper, we show how strong adversarial examples can be generated only at a cost similar to that of two runs of the fast gradient sign method (FGSM), allowing defense against adversarial attacks with a robustness level comparable to that of the adversarial training with multi-step adversarial examples. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-step defense approach against different attack methods and its improvements over existing defense strategies.